


035 "skateboarding"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [35]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Pre-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 05:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony and Pepper babysit the Rhodes kids—which to Tony means, taking them to a skateboarding park where he can show off his skills to the locals. “I AM TOTALLY IMMORTAL!!”</p>
            </blockquote>





	035 "skateboarding"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. The timeline is Chapter 2 of story 031 "wet."
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

            So this is how I imagined the scene at the Rhodes house went. Major James Rhodes came home to his idyllic suburban retreat after a Saturday spent dutifully toiling at the office on behalf of the United States military and American soldiers everywhere. He brushed the dirt off his American flag bumper sticker, greeted his adorable animal-shelter-rescued mixed-breed dog (mutts represent the very best of America), and wandered in to his cheerful, well-lit kitchen to say hello to his intelligent, selfless… um, clean wife. “Hello, darling!” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Where are our two lively, bright-eyed children? The house is so quiet without their delightful noises of wonder and discovery.”

            “Oh, they’ve gone out to play for the afternoon,” Rae answered, and suddenly the lights dimmed and Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ began crooning from an unseen speaker. “I thought you and I could do a little playing, too, soldier,” she cooed seductively, beginning to remove his hat and jacket. Rae was _very_ patriotic.

            The Major was not opposed to this idea. But certain embarrassing incidents in the past—which he had, unbeknownst to his wife, shared with his best friend, much to said friend’s amusement—prompted him to make sure that the children’s absence was prolonged. “You send them over to Tina’s?” he asked his wife as they continued with their expression of marital bliss. “Sean’s? The Martins’?” All of whom constituted safe and wholesome, as well as multicultural, harbors where their children could be temporarily nurtured.

            “No, Tony and Pepper took them to the skate park,” Rae revealed, respectfully and yet somehow sexily removing the medals pinned to her husband’s shirt.

            Marvin Gaye screeched to a halt and the lights popped back on. “ _Tony_?! The _skate park_?!”

            Rae was alarmed by her husband’s alarm. “Yes, they were skateboarding in the driveway and Tony offered to take them so they could have more ramps to ride on,” she explained in confusion. “I was watching them all afternoon, he always made sure they had their helmets and pads on—“ She had thought, for once, that her husband’s longtime friend—a man of dangerous virility but also a dangerous lack of common sense—was showing maturity and caution, and she had wished to reward him with greater responsibility.

            But had she instead made a _grievous error_? Dun dun dunnnnnnn!

            “What’s wrong?” she demanded of her husband.

            Rhodey did the math for her, amazed that a teacher couldn’t put it together on her own. “Tony plus a dangerous sport plus a bunch of young punks to show off in front of?”

            Rae’s stricken expression revealed the exact moment she realized what she’d done. “Oh, s—t.”

            Rhodey grabbed his recently-discarded car keys purposefully. “Let’s go.”

 

            I wasn’t exactly sure when Rhodey and Rae showed up at the skate park, but statistically speaking, it was probably while the crowd of long-haired skater punks was chanting my name as I stood at the top of the concrete half-pipe with a borrowed board, readying myself to perform some new and daring feat. I struck a heroic pose (good practice for later on) and raised my arm to signal for absolute silence. Then I let loose a dazzling display of grace and artistry, which I had just learned from a fifteen-year-old who smelled strongly of herbal substances (and I don’t mean cilantro). The crowd cheered my successful attempt and I coasted to a stop beside my entourage of two wide-eyed children and one hot blond in a Dolce & Gabbana suit.

            “I totally rock!” I announced to them unnecessarily, receiving excited high-fives from the kids. Pepper was still a little shaky on the concept of high fives so I didn’t want to push it with her.

            “Tony!” I heard suddenly behind me—not as in, you’re my new skate idol, dude! Or even as in, I may be jailbait but we could still party. But more like—“What the h—l do you think you’re doing?! Have you lost your mind?!”

            “What?” I asked innocently as Rhodey and Rae marched up to me. Intimidated by Rhodey’s military uniform and Rae’s inherent teacher attitude, my skater fans fled to the other side of the half-pipe. “It’s a skate park. I’m skating. What’s weird about that?”

            “You’re not using any protection, for one!” Rae pointed out.

            “Hey, if we’re going to resort to euphemisms, let’s pick a better one than ‘skating,’” I shot back. “Like, ‘waxing the car’ or ‘buttering the pasta’ or ‘spelunking’—“

            “I _meant_ , you’re not wearing a helmet,” Rae huffed, “and it sounds like you’ve already landed on your head a few times!”

            “Of course I’m not wearing a helmet,” I replied, as though it should be obvious. “How would people know it was _me_? But,” I added, turning to Mikey and Ellie, “these two are fully suited up, which is more important, don’t you think?”

            “Uncle Tony’s been _so cool_!” Mikey chirped excitedly.

            “Aw, thanks, kid,” I told him, affectionately knocking his helmeted head. “Kind of brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?”

            Pepper didn’t seem to think so. “Major Rhodes, Mrs. Rhodes,” she greeted. “Perhaps one of you could take custody of the children while I retrieve a first-aid kit from the car? Mr. Stark has suffered numerous abrasions.”

            This had become obvious to the newcomers. “Tony, you’re bleeding all over the place,” Rhodey pointed out.

            I took stock of my grazed hands, arms, and knees. “Oh, hardly,” I scoffed. “It’s all scabbing over pretty quick. Besides, it gives me street cred.”

            “These kids are less than half your age,” Rhodey went on in a chastising tone.

            “Harsh, man. What’s with the negativity? Us skaters just wanna be free from The Man,” I responded mellowly.

            Rhodey took my arm and dragged me a few feet away from the others. He didn’t like to chide me in front of Rae or the kids, apparently under the mistaken impression that it would embarrass me. “Well The Man is gonna kick your a-s if you don’t stop acting like an idiot!” he hissed at me.

            I really wasn’t getting it, but he seemed genuinely mad. “Look, what’s the problem? I’m not doing anything illegal, the kids are having a great time—“

            “You’re supposed to be watching them!”

            “I am!” I protested. “And so is Pepper, when it’s my turn on the pipe. They’re not off learning to shoot heroin into their eyeballs.”

            “You’re supposed to be watching them in the _kids’_ section,” he clarified, “not over here with the pothead drop-outs.” He sniffed suspiciously. “And if I find out that you’ve been—“

            _Now_ I was offended. “I _haven’t_ ,” I snapped. “I’m _watching the kids_.”

            “Then _watch_ them, d----t!” Rhodey ordered. “For once in your life just sit quietly on the sidelines on act like a grown-up, instead of trying to be the center of attention.”

            For a moment we just stared at each other. I had plenty of things I wanted to say but I wasn’t foolish enough to say them—apparently even my oldest friend would be surprised to learn I had that kind of restraint. Rhodey had always been the more cautious one, but it never used to get in the way of us having a good time. Or his job, for that matter—back in his flying days he had been one of the most daring pilots in his squadron. And now he was p----d because I’d scraped my elbow?

            “Maybe you’ve been behind a desk for too long,” I finally remarked.

            Before he could follow my tangential logic to figure out what I meant by that, one of the skater punks hailed me. “Tony, you’re up, dude!”

            “I’m up,” I told Rhodey, leaving him standing alone, looming over nothing.

            I had a special trick in mind for this next round, which I had a feeling would be my last for the day. The only reason Rhodey and Rae weren’t heading to their car right now was because the kids would’ve thrown a fit. But that threat wouldn’t hold them here forever. And once the kids left, I was going to feel like a sore old fogey who existed only to provide a little thin novelty for the young whippersnappers around me. So I had to make my last shot count.

            I saw it first in my Tony Hawk pro skater video game—no need to go into arcane skate slang, but let’s just say I had never mastered this trick in the virtual world, even in the easy mode. And with cheat codes. I balanced on the lip of the half-pipe, clearing my mind of everything but the physics of the equation for a perfect flight. And clearing _my_ mind was no easy task, I assure you. I wasn’t sure if the crowd had gone silent or not; in my mind there was silence. And then suddenly, I pushed off.

            It was an amazing trick—a seemingly impossible combination of speed, grace, and a temporary agreement with gravity to bend the law just a little. It would have been incredible all the way through—if I had managed to land with both feet squarely on the board. But I didn’t, and gravity snapped back into place with a vengeance.

            Still, it was a h—l of a wipeout.

            Especially when I immediately sprang up from the concrete and danced around in victory at being alive, to the amazed and delighted shouts of the crowd.

            “I AM TOTALLY IMMORTAL!!” I declared minutes later, in the back of the Rhodeses’ minivan.

            “Stop shouting,” Rae instructed from the front seat.

            “You’re totally stoned,” Rhodey grumbled as he drove us home.

            “I am _not_!” I protested, but giddily instead of angrily. Pepper was handling me expertly but could find no signs of breaks or even new scrapes, although my clothes were torn. I was riding pretty high on the endorphins of _not_ having snapped my neck.

            “What’s ‘stoned,’ Daddy?” Ellie asked curiously.

            “Um, well—“ Rhodey hesitated, cursing himself as I cackled in the background.

            Rae sensed a teaching moment and swooped in. “’Stoned’ means the way a person feels when they’ve taken bad drugs,” she explained quickly. “You remember what bad drugs are, don’t you?”

            “Oh yeah,” Mikey agreed. “Uncle Tony told us not to eat, drink, or smoke anything the strangers gave us, because they might be bad drugs.”

            “Ha ha ha,” I crowed smugly.

            “It would be nice if Uncle Tony took his own advice,” Rhodey muttered.

            “A contact high, at most,” I insisted cheerfully. “It was a little hard to get away from it, you know.”

            “Not if you’d stayed in the kids’ section,” Rhodey shot back.

            I was feeling way too good about the pulsing, vibrant beauty of life to let him get me down. “ _I_ am a god,” I announced grandly as the children giggled, “and _you_ have some kind of enormous stick shoved up your—“

            “Tony!” censored Rae.

            “—tailpipe!” I finished after a slight hitch. Rhodey seemed to be gripping the steering wheel like he wished it was my neck. “Besides, if I were really stoned, any second now I’d be feeling like I—“

            “Tony?” Rae questioned at the sudden silence, twisting around in her seat.

            “Mr. Stark?” asked Pepper.

            “Um, I think I’m gonna—yeah, I’m gonna throw up,” I decided.

            “Not. In. This. Car,” Rae declared. “We are almost home.”

            I managed to hold it. Just barely. The car was still technically rolling into the driveway when I hurled myself out the door and then, well, hurled. Thank G-d this was before the paparazzi started following me day and night, that’s all _I_ have to say.

 

            Half an hour later I was lying on the couch in Rhodey’s living room, watching CNN and sipping a club soda. I was wearing a pair of Rhodey’s old Air Force academy sweats and a Christian rock band t-shirt—I had not hit _only_ the driveway while booting up lunch. Pepper was in the laundry room soaking my clothes, and Rae was off giving the kids an emergency lesson in drug avoidance using finger puppets (or so I imagined). Buster was sitting on my lap being a dumb, loyal companion, which seemed like the best kind of companion to me at the moment. Though admittedly I was second choice to investigating the intriguing new substance in the driveway that Rhodey was currently hosing down. It was, I decided, an appropriate denouement to my day.

            The door to the garage opened and closed as Rhodey came back in after putting the hose away. He noted my quiet presence on the couch, then decided he could venture by the kitchen for a cold drink before settling into the chair near me. We watched the news for a while, offering an occasional neutral comment to ease the tension. Then the channel went to a commercial for a natural male enhancement product and I couldn’t think of a comment that would be neutral enough to risk.

            “That was a d—n impressive stunt you did today,” Rhodey said finally, which made me realize he was not actually paying attention to the natural male enhancement commercial (I hoped).

            “Yeah?” I asked, trying not to sound either too smug or too eager. I focused on scratching Buster’s ears instead.

            “How did you not simply kill yourself on that landing?” he continued thoughtfully, shaking his head. “Not a scratch. Not any new ones, anyway.”

            I wasn’t sure what would be the safe thing to say to that, since I wasn’t use to saying safe things. But I felt this was one of those moments when I ought to tread carefully. “Just lucky?”

            “It kind of reminded me—a little bit—of when we were testing experimental aircraft out at Lone Pine,” he reminisced. “You remember that?”

            “Yeah. That was fun.” Rhodey had spent his early Air Force career as a test pilot at an isolated base in Wyoming, a real middle-of-nowhere with nothing but scrub brush as far as the eye could see. I used to fly up on weekends with a few cases of beer and some friendly young ladies (not necessarily for Rhodey, you understand, but just for general morale improvement among the troops) and we’d go over the specs for whatever brilliant, revolutionary new plane my company was designing, which Rhodey got to test drive. Of course I flew them, too—I wouldn’t send my oldest pal up in something I wouldn’t fly myself—but the military brass put more stock in the reports of one of their own who was known to be steady and reliable, as opposed to the company salesman who was known to be a little experimental himself.

            I knew what he was going to say next. “Remember when—“

            “Yeah.” Something had gone wrong with one of the controls in a prototype airplane and Rhodey ended up spinning straight into a forest preserve. We found him hanging upside down by his harness in a tree, laughing his head off. Not a scratch on him. “I remember you totaled my plane.” That’s guy-talk for, I remember you scared the s—t out of me.

            He grinned a little just thinking of it. “That was the craziest ride I’ve ever been on. You know, I asked Rae out for the first time that night—I was so d—n happy I’d survived a plane crash, I figured it couldn’t hurt me if she turned me down.” And Rhodey’s days in the cockpits of experimental aircraft were numbered after that—being a test pilot was a profession favored by single men, not husbands and fathers.

            “Not that performing a skateboard trick is really comparable to flying a jet plane,” I conceded.

            “No,” he agreed, “but it reminded me, all the same.”

            We watched TV silently for a few more moments. “You know I really wasn’t smoking anything, right?” I asked him finally, forcing myself to invite the answer no matter what it was. “That I would never do drugs or drink when I was supposed to be looking after the kids?”

            He didn’t answer immediately, but sighed and gave me a sideways glance first. “Yeah, I know,” he decided slowly. “You were basically on a rollercoaster all afternoon. I figure you had to puke at some point.”

            “Hmm, hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “Good point. I had quite a lot of cheese fries beforehand.” Just the thought of them made my stomach gurgle in protest and I drank some more club soda.

            “I just—“ Rhodey started, then stopped. I looked at him questioningly. “One of these days your luck is gonna run out, Tony.”

            I smirked. “Well, at least I have a positive attitude about my destructive habits. Besides, when it _does_ run out, you’ll be there to save my a-s.”

            He looked like he doubted that. But we toasted to the plan anyway.

 

            Coda: Pepper’s phone ran with the _Addams Family_ theme song, which I had programmed in and forbidden her to change. “Obadiah’s on the line!” I announced unnecessarily, pleased with my little gag. All I had to do now was figure out a way _he_ could hear it, too.

            “Hello, Mr. Stane,” Pepper greeted, feeding me more unsalted, unbuttered popcorn as I lay with my head in her lap on our couch. She was only allowing me to eat bland foods for the rest of the night, and I was only agreeing to do so if she fed me by hand herself. The arrangement seemed fair to both of us.

            “Obie, you shoulda seen the awesome board trick I pulled today!” I said loudly into the air, over whatever Pepper was saying. It sounded vaguely like, ‘Yes, he’s alive, Mr. Stane.’

            “He says he _did_ see it,” Pepper reported to me, at which I expressed considerable confusion. “He says it’s on YouTube.”

            Immediately I ran to the computer and looked it up. “God bless those little skater punks and their camcorders! Ooh, I found it! Lookit, Pepper, lookit!” This was how I knew how beautiful and amazing my trick was, and how spectacular my crash. “Oh my G-d! I totally face-planted that cement! I can feel things break just watching it! Let’s rewind.”

            “No, he’s alright, Mr. Stane,” Pepper was saying in the background. “He has a few scrapes and bruises from his earlier tricks, but he was unharmed by this fall.” She pulled the phone away slightly. “Mr. Stane suggests you visit a hospital for a thorough examination anyway.”

            “Tell Mr. Stane to kiss my immortal a-s,” I told her gleefully. “I’m emailing this video to HR. They can put it in their holiday montage of my greatest hits for the year.” Those were always extremely popular.

* * *


End file.
